Would you be surprised to know that by 2026, eight in 10 enterprises will have data spread across multiple cloud providers and on-premises data centers? This prediction by Ventana Research’s Matt Aslett is based, at least in part, on the trend of organizations increasingly using more than one cloud service in addition to their on-premises infrastructure.

Optimizing all of this data—regardless of where it lives—requires a modern data platform capable of accessing and managing data in hybrid environments. “As such, there is a growing requirement for cloud-agnostic data platforms, both operational and analytic, that can support data processing across hybrid IT and multi-cloud environments,” Aslett explains.

For many organizations, managing data while ensuring quality in any environment is a struggle. New data sources are constantly emerging and data volumes are growing at unprecedented rates. When you couple this with an increase in the number of data-intensive applications and analysts who need quality data, it’s easy to see why data management is more complex but more necessary than ever before.

As organizations are finding, data management and data quality problems can and will scale—challenges, silos, and inefficient data processes that exist on-premises or in one cloud will compound as you migrate across multiple clouds or hybrid infrastructures. That’s why it’s essential to fix those issues now and implement effective data management strategies that can scale with you. 

Replacing Complexity with Simplicity

Ventana research also says that traditional approaches to data processing rely on a complex and often “brittle” architecture. This type of architecture uses a variety of specialized products cobbled together from multiple vendors, which in turn require specialized skill sets to use effectively.

As additional technologies are bolted onto the architecture, processes and data sharing become even more complex. In fact, one problem we see at Actian is that organizations continue to add new data and analytics products into ecosystems that are bogged down with legacy technologies. This creates a complicated tech stack of disparate tools, programming languages, frameworks, and technologies that create barriers to integrating, managing, and sharing data.

For a company to be truly data-driven, data must be easily accessible and trusted by every analyst and data user across the enterprise. Any obstacles to tapping into new data sources or accessing quality data, such as requiring ongoing IT help, encourage data silos, and shadow IT—common problems that can lead to misinformed decision-making and will cause stakeholders to lose confidence in the data.

A modern data platform that makes data easy to access, share, and trust with 100% confidence is needed to encourage data use, automate processes, inform decisions, and feed data-intensive applications. The platform should also deliver high performance and be cost-effective to appeal to everyone from data scientists and analysts who use the data to the CFO who’s focused on the IT budget.

Manageability and Usability Are Critical Platform Capabilities

Today’s data-driven environment demands an easy-to-use cloud data platform. Choosing the best platform to meet your business and IT needs can be tricky. Recognized industry analyst research can help by identifying important platform capabilities and identifying which vendors lead in those categories.

For example, Ventana Research’s “Data Platforms Value Index” is an assessment you can use to evaluate vendors and products. One capability the assessment evaluated is product manageability, which is how well the product can be managed technologically and by the business, and how well it can be governed, secured, licensed, and supported in a service level agreement (SLA).

The assessment also looked at the usability of the product—how well it meets the various business needs of executives, management, workers, analysts, IT, and others. “The importance of usability and the digital experience in software utilization has been increasing and is evident in our market research over the last decade,” the assessment notes. “The requirements to meet a broad set of roles and responsibilities across an organization’s cohorts and personas should be a priority for all vendors.”

The Actian Data Platform ranked second for manageability and third for usability, which reflects the platform’s ease of use by making data easy to connect, manage, and analyze. These key capabilities are must-haves for data-driven companies.

Cut Prep Time While Boosting Data Quality

According to Ventana Research, 69% of organizations cite data prep as consuming the most time in analytics initiatives, followed by reviewing data for quality issues at 64%. This is consistent with what we hear from our customers

This is due to data silos, data quality concerns, IT dependency, data latency, and not knowing the steps to optimize data to intelligently grow the business. Organizations must remove these barriers to go from data to decision with confidence and ease.

The Actian Data Platform’s native data integration capabilities can help. It allows you to easily unify data from different sources to gain a comprehensive and accurate understanding of all data, allowing for better decision-making, analysis, and reporting. The platform supports any source and target data, offers elastic integration and cloud-automated scaling, and provides tools for data integration management in hybrid environments.

You benefit from codeless API and application integration, flexible design capabilities, integration templates, and the ability to customize and re-use integrations. Our integration also includes data profiling capabilities for reliable decision-making and a comprehensive library of pre-built connectors.

The platform is unique in its ability to collect, manage, and analyze data in real-time with its transactional database, data integration, data quality, and data warehouse capabilities. It manages data from any public cloud, multi- or hybrid cloud, and on-premises environments through a single pane of glass. In addition, the platform offers self-service data integration, which lowers costs and addresses multiple use cases, without needing multiple products.

As Ventana Research’s Matt Aslett noted in his analyst perspective, our platform reduces the number of tools and platforms needed to generate data insights. Streamlining tools is essential to making data easy and accessible to all users, at all skill levels. Aslett also says, “I recommend that all organizations that seek to deliver competitive advantage using data should evaluate Actian and explore the potential benefits of unified data platforms.”

At Actian, we agree. That’s why I encourage you to experience the Actian Data Platform for yourself or join us at upcoming industry events to connect with us in person.

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